Glee Club

Fresh starts on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and “Younger.”

The original songs on “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” have a remarkably high hit rate.

Illustration by David Saracino

The premise of “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” might make Sheryl Sandberg cringe: The day that Rebecca Bunch makes partner at a corporate law firm, she bumps into her old boyfriend Josh Chan. He’s an aimless So-Cal bro, while she’s a Manhattan workaholic, and the two dated for about two minutes at summer camp, but so what. The minute that Josh mentions West Covina—an unremarkable California suburb that people keep faint-praising as “only two hours from the beach”—she’s hooked. She quits, moves west, becomes the only Harvard-educated lawyer at a strip-mall law firm, and schemes to get her man. But first she bursts into song.

“Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” on the CW, has at least two original songs per episode, complete with dance numbers. It stars its little-known co-creator, Rachel Bloom. And it’s a romantic comedy whose heroine is pretty much a delusional stalker, in the tradition of “Felicity,” another good-girl-gone-creepy, who switched coasts in the opposite direction (although, as Rebecca insists in the opening credits, it’s “more nuanced than that”).

This is a ridiculously high level of difficulty for any new show, which makes it all the more miraculous that “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” like its heroine, has such eccentric, slow-build charisma. Like the low-key telenovela “Jane the Virgin,” which also airs on the CW, “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” looks wacky but feels grounded, with the compassion for dumb behavior that you’d hope for from your best friend. In particular, “Crazy Ex-­Girlfriend” has a boundlessly chill acceptance of its heroine’s seeming mood disorder. Sure, Rebecca has rotten boundaries. She binge-eats pork tacos and chugs vodka before a big meeting. She has daddy issues and narcissist-mom ones, too. She scavenges uppers off the bathroom floor. Her neighbor Heather initially pegs Rebecca as a case study for her psych class. Then she decides that she likes her too much to diagnose her condition.

A few episodes in, I had a similar reaction: this show is just too juicy, and too bold, to nitpick. Like most rom-coms, it features a love quadrangle, steering among Rebecca; Josh; Josh’s yoga-instructor girlfriend, Valencia; and Greg, Josh’s friend, who has a crush on Rebecca. But it keeps swerving unexpectedly, favoring wit and insight over formula. Greg, played by the Broadway star Santino Fontana, is particularly appealing: he’s melancholic, self-destructive, witty, and decent, with flashes of anger. It would be easy for this show to switch angles, becoming about Greg, a sad sack with a crush on a difficult woman. There are multiple dark comedies like that out there, from great ones, like FX’s “Louie,” to inconsistent ones, like FXX’s “Man Seeking Woman,” and seriously irritating ones that involve elaborate metaphors about French clowning and star Zach Galifianakis, like FX’s terrible new “Baskets.” (FX, mix it up!) Instead, Rebecca, who could be the show’s manic-pixie object, is its goofball subject. It’s refreshing as well that she’s portrayed by Bloom, who has a regular, untoned body—not fat but “British nanny” busty, to quote Heather—which she uses for slapstick humiliation and also for being sexy, with no apparent contradiction.

The musical elements have a remarkably high hit rate. In one episode, Greg woos Rebecca in a black-and-white Fred Astaire routine, “Settle For Me.” “Yes, Josh is a dream, but I’m right here / In flesh and blood and self-hate! / Settle for me / In a sad way, darling, it’s fate.” (The song includes the seductive promise “Like two-per-cent milk or seitan beef, I almost taste the same.”) When Rebecca hooks up on a Tinder date, she gyrates to an R. & B. number with the refrain “Please don’t be a murderer.” Her mother (played by the national treasure Tovah Feldshuh) sings a ballad of nagging that includes the line “Are you using the lotion that I sent you? / If you’re not gonna use it, I’ll return it to the store.”

Adult comedies like this one, warm but not awww-corny, may be my favorite current TV phenomenon. The best such shows, which can be traced back to “My So-Called Life,” give every character a say. It may seem as if I’m picking on “Baskets,” but it’s telling to contrast that show with “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend.” “Baskets” is also set in small-town California; it, too, features a depressed protagonist who trained for a high-status job but took a mediocre gig instead. (Chip Baskets, played by Galifianakis, having flunked out of a Paris clown school, is reduced to playing rodeos.) But “Baskets” sees through its hero’s bitter eyes: nearly everyone is a loser, a bitch, or a rival. On “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend,” even walk-ons get solid bits. In one of this season’s more memorable sequences, a friend of Josh’s remarks, “The nicest thing I ever did for a girl was pull out.” He explains that he’s just talking about parking, and keeps going, peeling off increasingly raunchy yet innocent parking references. “I’m just happy I have a spot at all,” he concludes, dreamily. “Because I used to have to pay.” It feels like a “room joke,” one of those bits that comedy writers know won’t quite fit. But they left it in anyway, because it felt right.

Have I made my case? Because—why pretend?—I’m clearly doubling as an advocate: I want this funky, off-the-radar sleeper to get better ratings, if only so that I can keep watching it. TV has plenty of ambitious experiments that are brutal to watch. On an arctic Monday in January, I’d rather sing along.

Darren Star’s “Younger,” on TV Land, has an even more absurd premise. It’s also about a woman re-starting her life, but this one’s just moving from New Jersey to Brooklyn. Sutton Foster—the Broadway star who lit up “Bunheads”—plays Liza Miller, a forty-year-old mom who gets dumped by her husband. In a fun-house-mirror version of the publishing industry, the only way that Liza can find work is to masquerade as a millennial and become a low-level assistant. She moves in with her friend Maggie, a lesbian artist with a hangar-sized Williamsburg loft. She buys some thrift-shop cardigans and, one presumes, a Costco bucket of eye cream. And then she starts dating Josh, a sweet twenty-­something tattoo artist who doesn’t realize that Liza is forty, doesn’t know that she has an eighteen-year-old daughter living in India, and doesn’t read books. (An ex sniffily describes him as “dumb as a box of hair.”)

The first season had a few clueless moments (my favorite was a Twitter campaign called #ShowUsYourOates, in which Joyce Carol Oates fans were encouraged to share topless selfies—a plot written with no awareness that Oates herself is an O.G. tweeter). But, like “Crazy Ex-Girlfriend” and its triple threat of a leading lady, “Younger” has a disarming blend of brass and humility. The second season, judging from the first three episodes, is a real step up. Josh now knows Liza’s age. Her daughter is back from India. And the writers have contrived a scheme that makes it logical for Liza to keep up the charade (here be spoilers): she is part of a brand-new imprint for millennials, launched by Kelsey, her best friend, played by the endearing and shiny-haired Hilary Duff, giving digital strivers a good name.

The third episode is a delightful mashup of all the qualities that any viewer who misses Star’s “Sex and the City” might enjoy: a glamorous media launch, an avant-garde dress gone horribly wrong, four women debating the etiquette of anal sex, a misread text message, some “Portlandia”-esque satire of trends (“The bruschetta is made from rescue tomatoes and day-of-expiration burrata”), and an appealing scene of one friend helping another through a breakdown. There are gags about vaping and ghosting and penis cages, along with a list of influencers that wittily blends the real and the fake: “the Fat Jewish, the Waifish Mormon, Pompous Croissant, Man Repeller.” The show’s ensemble shines, especially Miriam Shor, Samantha Jones-ing it up as Liza’s Gen X boss, who even delegates walking to her wage slaves. For all its tweaking of kids today, “Younger” ’s most original quality may be how well it nails old-media bosses. The goofy premise suggests an alternative view of the generation gap: maybe it’s Gen X-ers who are the distracted ones, too narcissistic to look closely at just who is fetching their espresso. ♦